Memory Mosaics: Researching Teacher Professional Learning Through Artful Memory-work

This book communicates new voices, insights, and possibilities for working with the arts and memory in researching teacher professional learning. The book reveals how, through the arts, teacher-researchers can reimagine and reinvigorate moments of the past as embodied and empowering scholarly experiences. The peer-reviewed chapters were composed from juxtaposing unique "mosaic" pieces written by 21 new and emerging scholars in South Africa and Canada. Their research explores diverse arts-based practices and resources including collage, film, drawing, narrative, poetry, photography, storytelling and television alongside related ethical issues. Critically, Memory Mosaics also demonstrates how artful memory-work can engender agency in professional learning with teacher-researchers taking up pressing issues of social justice such as inclusion and decolonisation. Overall, the book offers a multidimensional, polyvocal exploration of how artful memory-work can bring about future-oriented professional learning enacted as pedagogies of reinvention and productive remembering.

Memory Mosaics: Researching Teacher Professional Learning Through Artful Memory-Work, by Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Daisy Pillay, and Claudia Mitchell, along with teacher-researchers on two continents, is a ground-breaking book. It models a collaborative approach to arts-based research that melds memory-work, visual and poetic arts, and reflective practice to promote professional learning, personal transformation, decolonisation, and a more just future. Like colourful pebbles and bits of glass, the authors place teachers' self-stories in relation to one another in an artful design, creating thematic coherence that evokes a deep sense of knowing. Judith C. Lapadat, Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Education, University of Lethbridge, Canada

Memory Mosaics: Researching Teacher ProfessionalLearning Through Artful Memory-Workassembles exemplars of professional learning in an intriguing mosaic format. A topic is introduced, followed by memory-pieces; then: discussion and/or creative response. This lively juxtaposition generates momentum for highly productive forms of remembering around social justice issues, even as the reader is invited into an intimate circle of shared concern: for these issues, with these (and other) teacher-researchers.  It is a beautiful, original, and practical book. Teresa Strong-Wilson, Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, McGill University, Canada

Acknowledgements.- New Voices, Insights, Possibilities for Working with the Arts and Memory in Researching Teacher Professional Learning by Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Daisy Pillay, and Claudia Mitchell.- "To Seek Out Something More": Knowing the Teacher-Researcher Self Differently Through Self-Narrative Writing and Found Photographs by Daisy Pillay, Sagie Naicker, and Wendy Rawlinson.- Working with Photographs: Seeing, Looking, and Visual Representation as Professional Learning by Claudia Mitchell, Katie MacEntee, Mary Cullinan, and Patti Allison.- Picturing a More Hopeful Future: Teacher-Researchers Drawing Early Memories of School by Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Hlengiwe (Mawi) Makhanya, Graham Downing, and Nontuthuko Phewa.- Collaging Memories: Reimagining Teacher-Researcher Identities and Perspectives by Daisy Pillay, Reena Ramkelewan, and Anita Hiralaal.- Seeing Through Television and Film: The Teacher's Gaze in Professional Learning by Claudia Mitchell, Bridget Campbell, Stephanie Pizzuto, and Brian Andrew Benoit.- Creative Nonfiction Narratives and Memory-Work: Pathways for Women Teacher-Researchers' Scholarship of Ambiguity and Openings by Daisy Pillay, Mary Cullinan, and Leighandri Moodley.- The Promise of Poetry Belongs to Us All: Poetic Professional Learning in Teacher-Researchers' Memory-Work by Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, S'phiwe Madondo, and Edwina Grossi.- Stories Blending, Flowing Out: Connecting Teacher Professional Learning, Re-Membering, and Storytelling by Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Sandra Owén:nakon Deer-Standup, and Thokozani Ndaleni.- Ethically Significant Moments in Stirring Up Memories by Claudia Mitchell, Sifiso Magubane, Casey Burkholder, and Sheeren Saloojee.